Not for profit and not waiting for anyone: The Humane Society's forward thinking tips on social

This is part two of notes from the Facebook ROI event as part of Social Media Week London #SMWUK. 

Carie Lewis of The Humane Society (US) was one powerhouse of a (social) woman! Here I've tried to get down as much as I could of her rapid-fire goodness. The Humane Society are getting very strong results, so I highly recommend taking two minutes to cast an eye over her tips below.
Please forgive the rough notes and over to you Carie...

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The Humane Society

- raised 500K via FB fan based fundraising (2009 - 2011)

- stimulated 100K to take action in the 9 months of 2012

- have a self-funding social team! All the people working on social are payed through revenue gained through social

Structures and working practices that work for The Humane Society:

- have a dedicated social : PR liaison "social communications manager" (from my experience - most of the industry is too silo'ed and missing this opportunity to massively amplify social and PR content and activity - this is a brilliant idea!)

- SM is a small part of everyone's job, but we are the (friendly) gatekeeper. 

- The Humane Society have over 100 presences on FB in addition to our fan page. This is great and we manage it by requesting they all  sign an admin contract so we have shared expectations. The clear agreement helps communications consistency and shared improvements

- response time - FB = 2 hrs and Tw 30mins

- no automated tools. The team craft appropriate messages for each platform

- not afraid to make mistakes. And have a crisis plan.

- every single piece of content is shareable on FB, twitter and via email

- Home page has live feed of social content

- have a daily comms meeting every morning - 9mins - so they each share what each person shares what putting out that day. Integration!

- have a content plan (ensuring good content). Flexible but ensures continuity

- don't measure success by number of fans / followers. This is just the beginning of the relationship

- do people who you engage with do what you want? (tie your activity to your goals)

- how can you get them to do it

- how are you making it valuable to your fans?

- how will you get them to come back

- post once a day >> relavent, interesting and ??

How we use social 'channels':

Twitter - customer service and relationship tool

FB - our action oriented community and deeper, sustained relationship tool

Monitoring - across all channels (and all versions of the Humane Society name)

The Humane Society's social philosophy:

- provide what our audience want

- make it fun with competitions

- show audience ways they can make a difference

- use polls for simple engagement

- listen to all posts

- answer every question.

- Have creative additional engagement opportunities - have regular fun stuff i.e. fun fridays or questions for the audience such as "how did your pet get their name?" Which got 1000 responses

How we convert from Fans to Constituents:

- bring all asks inside FB (don't redirect to site etc i.e. forms, entries.

- give them options 

- use explicit call to actions

- allow comments but have a policy and monitor

- ask people to share immediately after they take action

- don't dismiss custom tabs yet (1% of people go there) i.e. put magazine in the custom tab and handle questions there

- use promoted posts (which will increase £) to increase base. v. targeted 

- close the loop on previous posts - i.e. show the audience impact of their vote

- make it personal - tie it to them. i.e. their top campaign, "I will not leave behind my pet behind" about what happens in personal household emergencies

Measures that The Humane Society Use

- no. of actions taken

- no. of donors

- amount of donations

- no. of new names to file

- customer service wins

- sentiment %

- growth rate

- most popular content

- no. mentions

- notable mentions (i.e. celebs, supporters, orgs, companies) Supporters with influential bases

>> do a weekly reports for the execs. 

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There you have it, a bullet list of useful goodness from a team clearly well ahead of the curve in using social to build their engaged audience.

You can find more of Carie's thoughts and presentations here: http://www.slideshare.net/cariegrls

Thank you Carie!

Social media strategy, metrics and tips from Play.com

The over-subscribed Facebook ROI event as part of Social Media Week London #SMWUK yielded some great advice and some handy benchmarks for those thinking through their social strategy. The impressive triple act of Chris Howard of Play.com, Carie Lewis of The Humane Society (US) and Tejay Patel of Nokia had these words of wisdom for us... (please forgive me if I have missed a wee bit here and there as I was getting it down)

This first post will be learnings from Chris Howard, Head of Online Marketing at Play.com. Over to you Chris...

Thinking about social media ROI and Metrics

There are so many myths around social ROI. The two most common ones are 1) that it is impossible to measure and 2) you can measure ROI, but it's not worth it because the impact is so small. 

These myths are perpetuated because of laziness, location and lack of urgency. What does this mean?

• if measure based on last click effectiveness, yes results are limited, particularly in comparison to  search and affiliates. Search is essentially funnelling existing interest / purchase funnel. Affiliates are effective as they they do the same, driving conversion, often based on discounts and offers. But this is not the whole picture. It is just measuring the last step in the consumer purchase funnel. 
• Social - In social we get to speak not just to people ready to buy, we speak to people not in the existing purchase funnel (earlier), therefore the direct last click impact is limited. On the other hand, we reach and activate potential new / repeat buyers and therefore can gain more incremental sales. 
• Location - where social media sits in organisation. Often in areas that not commonly held accountable to sales targets i.e PR, customer service v sales or commercial. 
• Lack of urgency - often no clear spending on social vs. the £5million you are spending on TV - therefore limited urgency to measure ROI of that channel vs. traditional media

At Play.com they have a new version of purchase funnel with additional metrics:

1. Fan acquisition

2. Post engagement

3. Campaign engagement (metrics generating customer insight re customer interests and permissions)

4. New customers (which is where the standard sales business metrics sit)

Tips and results for each stage of the Play.com purchase funnel

1. Fan acquisition

Tips: Use competitions, 'like gate' to ensure FB fans, cross promotion on email, leverage owned media.

2. Post engagement (engagement being likes, shared etc) 

Tips: most posts drive conversation rather than purchase (around the categories). Each post has multiple calls to action, limited to 2-3 posts per day (timed for greatest engagement - lunchtime, mid pm and as people are leaving work.

Results: by optimising the timing of posts they moved from 5K talking to 20K talking about this

3. Campaign engagement

Tips: Run multiple campaigns in parallel for wide appeal. i.e. trip to NYC with a film or exclusive clothing to different demographic, incentivise sharing to drive reach into friends of fans, ensure data capture for future retargeting. 

Results: 

- Play.com can have 50K users entering competitions per month. 

- Customers who have interacted with Play.com on FB on average spend 24% more than customers that have not in the subsequent 6 months.

4. New customers

Tips: only integrate product offers within conversation posts if it is a truly exceptional offer, include buy now CTA, exclusive time limited offers relevant to our fans interests

Results:

- Customers acquired via FB - on average spend 30% more 

- FB is their best channel for fan acquisition - more than 50% higher likelihood that sale will be (?? apols, missed the rest)

- Currently more than 1% sales on Play.com are via FB and it is their fastest growth channel.

Planning your social media strategy

Steps recommended as your plan your social media strategy:

1. define the business objective your social media will address

2. plan measurement into your SM activity

3. feed the top of the funnel with new fans and use your existing fans to help

4. learn from what works and optimise accordingly

Thank you to Facebook, EngageSciences and Chris for their generosity in sharing this practical and insightful advice.

Up next, the fabulous tips from Carie and Tejay. Stay tuned...

Every business is social

A business involves people. People buy the business outputs. Ergo, a business is social.

I often get asked by business owners 'what is social media' and 'how do I set up Facebook for my business'? It seems everyone wants to go social.

Sometimes what people miss is that they already are.

My answer is simple, and the acts are simple, but still, simple acts can still generate profound changes in an organisation.

The simple answer - social is an amplification of existing ways of communicating.

Instead of phoning or emailing your customers one by one, you can share information about your business with all those that 'follow' you in various ways. Instead of broadcasting using a megaphone, because someone has chosen to link with you, its like you are having a conversation in the same room. You can point at things using links, Slideshare, Youtube and Skitch. You can show how much you like what they are doing by sharing their information with your 'room'. And this can all be done in a way that is infinitely 'spreadable' in a social chain reaction.

This is true both internally and externally within a business.

So the first part of my advice is simple - map your customer touch points and start with those. Is there a way you can a) help those be better experiences and b) help spread the word about your business?

The obvious place to start is customer service - can you add more ways for people to simply connect with you and resolve a query immediately, rather than over days waiting for email or call backs? Adding Twitter and live chat could help reduce issue resolution time and potentially head count. But then lets move on to your shipments - can you add a customised message for your customer on your delivery docket, with an invitation link to see the latest trends in their industry, a secret customer-only event or a slide-share presentation on best-practice on shaving costs on shipping in their industry?

Social is being yourself (your Brand), but amplified.

My top 3 tips for businesses as they are starting to dip their toe in:

1. Give. Be useful. People share things that are useful and good.
2. Be relevant. People are time poor - give them what they want and need. If you are highly technical company with a highly technical audience, it is unlikely that they want to be friends with you on facebook. But they are likely to want to read new developments that your CTO finds interesting on your blog.
3. Be real. People interact with people, not things. Part of the enjoyment of engaging with a brand or a business is learning the real people involved in it, being one of the community with a real relationship with you, not just someone who has read the brochure.

As with any technology / behavioural adoption, once you've taken the first step, you're already in a new and exciting place.

You? Where do you think a business should start in their social adoption?

Notes: This article was inspired by an article by Jed Hallam, part 2 of a series on the social business. You should read it, it's good :)

Image credit: Faithoncampus

noise and common sense

It feels like there is a hyerbabble of noise around marketing and social media...so much so that I wonder how much is noise and how much is actually just common sense?

Why are people scurrying to have a presence in the latest social medium, forums and events? Is it to have a voice, to enable customers to talk to you, to be cool?
Is this about being cool, or just common sense that you need to enable customers to speak with you and tell you what they want?

And all this talk of authenticity, firms trying to act with and create that sense of authenticity, trying to make sure each and every touch point is authentic. Perhaps if they just focused on what they wanted and needed to do, and focused on doing it well...I guess that would be pretty authentic!

Authenticity is about doing what you say you will, being what you say you are, and interacting in an honest way with people. It really should be pretty straight forward. Although it may not always be that easy when enmeshed in a history of organisational systems, products, processes and politics.

Common sense doesn't have to just mean using logical (and proven) tactics and offerings in the market, it can be just as sensible to offer something extraordinarily different in the market. This means that you have less direct competition, more efficient marketing spend and increased opportunities for sustained brand differentiation and growth. It is also common sense to understand where you customers are going, understanding their evolving needs, particularly in a culture-shifting moment such as the current GFC, as highlighted by Trendwatching.com.

To me, it is common sense that when you deliver what people want, with honest conversation about what they want, customers will be happy, and your business will grow. And if you find new tools to do that better, be it social media or not, it is common sense to use them too.

Flickr photo credit: goodbyebyesunday's

time to bring their own voice back into the fold?

I was talking about authenticity of a brand, of a company’s voice with some friends last night, discussing how today, anything less and you will be outed, barred and worst of all – a social media outcast at one sniff of inauthentic writer.

Which made us think aboutall those “newsletters” that companies put out – digitally or physical, most companies have one in belief that this is what keeps them in contact with their customers. Yet, in reality, most of the time these are outsourced to a PR company or similar. If someone isn’t in your business, and has no contact with your customers…how is this an authentic voice? (I realise there may be fantastic exceptions) In a quick straw poll we realised that we all ignore these publications as having no meaningful content. We are certainly not engaged with them or as a consequence the brand.

Parallel to this is the increasing need for companies to participate in dialogue with their customers, often facilitated through blogs, active forums, facebook and twitter accounts. To do this well organisations need to be generating and using a lot more, current, content.

So the logical next question is – will companies start to bring their own voice back into their fold? Will they bring in their newsletters, wesbites and magazines not only to speak with a more authentic voice, but because it is a far more efficient use of resources?

This will vary with organisational type and their customer profiles, for example – a utility may still most effectively use an insert with a bill (for now), but what about a high-end investment firm?

I am looking forward to seeing what happens as more companies find their own voice again – and in doing so, start a real conversation with their customers.

(13 May, 2009)

hunting conversations

So, you know you are meant to be participating in, starting, aware of and contributing to conversations about your brand and area of expertise. Conversation is apparently the new black. Or was that aubergine?

Where to start?

My knowledge is very basic compared to people who live and breathe this, so I’ll start with the basics! As a practicising marketeer – I have found there are some useful blog search tools (after google and twitter searches) to start to get a feel for where and how people are talking about your brand.

http://www.blogpulse.com/

http://blogsearch.google.com

http://www.blogcatalog.com

http://technorati.com/

I would think through the following questions:

1. What are the key items people are talking about over a longer (3-6 month) period? – informing potential key customer drivers, conversation starters and potential pain-points that you can address.

2. Where are they talking? This forms a basis of where you should be listening.

3. Who is talking? Are they are small, specialist and passionate group or is a broader conversation in the community? This can shape how you could start a dialogue.

4. How are they talking? What is the language used? Is it the same as the language you use? Is there a disconnect?

There are also some seriously powerful ongoing social media monitoring tools that you can use as aggregators to efficiently manage this process, for example Radian6 and Collective Intellect.

(update - Radian6 also advised me of the most useful and free SocialMention - thanks!)

(19 April, 2009)